The blinking red light was a declaration. Lena’s burning eyes were a demand. He had to go. The choice was not a choice; it was a consequence that had finally arrived at his door. He moved through the Foundry Chorus, the vast, breathing space of the rebellion’s heart, and the nervous energy felt different now. It was sharper. The hum of a hundred people holding their breath had been replaced by the quiet, purposeful movements of a machine being armed.
He went to his small alcove, a space barely large enough for a cot and a footlocker. He was a man who believed in the reclamation of the soul, but his preparations were brutally practical. A spare power cell for his comm link. Two nutrient paste packets, the gray, tasteless stuff that was the fuel of the Waking world. A water flask. He was not a soldier. He was a teacher, a healer. His tools were his voice and his mind. He would go alone. A single man was a smaller signature, a whisper in the noise of the city. It was the logical, efficient thing to do. The thought tasted like ash.
He turned to leave and they were there. Four of them. Lena Petrova stood in the center, flanked by three of her hunters. They were not the anxious recruits he guided through dreams of forgotten beaches. They were young, hard, and moved with a coiled stillness. They wore dark, functional clothing, stripped of all identity except for the tools they carried: stun batons, spools of high-tensile wire, and the grim certainty in their eyes. They blocked the corridor.
"We’re coming with you," Lena said. It was not a request. Her voice was flat, the same tone she used when she called his philosophy a hobby.
"No," Elias said, his own voice quiet but firm. He had to hold this line. To take them was to accept her premise, to admit this was a war fought with bodies and not just minds. The price of that admission was the soul of the entire rebellion. "I’m going to observe. One man is a low risk. Five is a military unit."
"It’s a morgue, Elias. You’re going to a morgue to see how the man died," she countered, taking a single step forward. The three hunters behind her didn’t move, but the space they occupied felt heavier. "You are a teacher. We are hunters. This is a hunt. You need us."
He looked past her, at the faces of her team. He saw the ghost of the grieving recruit he had just taught to dream, but twisted into something else. The pain was not a memory to be healed; it was an edge to be sharpened. He had taught them to build. Lena had taught them to aim. He saw now that the rebellion needed both. To deny that was to be a fool. A dead fool.
"You follow my orders," he said. The words felt foreign in his mouth. A concession. A defeat. The axis of their small world tilted.
Lena gave a sharp, single nod. "As long as they’re the right orders."
They moved through the warren of service tunnels, leaving the warm, metallic scent of the Foundry behind. The air grew colder, thick with the smell of damp concrete and rust. They reached a hidden dock in the deep canals, the city’s forgotten vascular system. A low, grated platform sat beside a channel of black, sluggish water. Moored to it was a mag-skiff, a small, battered transport vessel no longer than a maintenance cart. Its hull was a patchwork of scavenged panels, its drive housings scarred and dented. It was ugly and functional. It was theirs.
They boarded in silence. One of the hunters, a boy with old eyes, ran a quick diagnostic, his fingers flying over a small, handheld terminal. A low hum vibrated through the deck as the magnetic drive engaged, lifting the skiff a few inches above the water’s surface. With a soft splash, they slid out into the main channel, a black river flowing through a canyon of weeping concrete and bundled cables as thick as a man’s waist. Dim, caged emergency lights cast long, yellow smears on the water.
Elias sat near the stern, watching the dark water slide by. He thought of the Weaver’s Thread, the symbol he taught his students. The act of pulling a single, coherent thread of thought from the chaos of the subconscious. He had seen a flaw in the recruit’s first weave, a single frayed thread where the real world bled through. He saw it now in his own rebellion. Jax, the technician, cannibalizing one machine to save another. Corbin, the analyst, lost in a sea of predictive data. Lena, turning grief into a spear. They were all just frayed threads, pulling in different directions. The fabric was tearing.
"Comms are up," the young hunter said, his voice tight. "Jax is on the line."
A crackle of static filled the air, then Jax’s perpetually tired voice. — You’re in the water. I’m tracking your signature. It’s faint, but it’s there. Keep your speed under 20 knots. Any faster and the energy bleed will light you up like a festival.
"We hear you, Jax," Elias said into his own comm link.
— There’s a Warden patrol near the Sector Delta junction, — Jax continued. — A single riverine skiff. Standard patrol. They’re running sonar-logic nets, but they’re on a wide, passive sweep. They shouldn’t see you if you keep quiet.
"And if they do?" Lena asked, her voice cutting through the static.
A pause. "Then your new friends get to do what they do best," Jax said, his tone grim. "Try not to. We can’t afford to lose the skiff. Jax out."
The comm went silent. Lena looked at Elias, an unspoken challenge in her eyes. He ignored it, turning his gaze back to the canal. The hum of the skiff was the only sound, a low thrum against the steady drip of water from the ceiling high above. He was a healer in a boat full of soldiers, on his way to a crime scene. He was a man who had lost the argument.
They traveled for another twenty minutes, the silence broken only by the quiet commands of the hunter piloting the skiff. They were a good team, Elias had to admit. Efficient. They checked their gear, monitored the skiff’s power consumption, and watched the dark water with an unnerving focus. They were machines built for a single purpose. He wondered if there was anything left inside them to heal.
"Contact," the pilot whispered.
Up ahead, maybe 400 meters where the canal opened into a wider junction, a light swept across the water. It was the powerful searchlight of a Warden riverine skiff, a vessel three times the size of their own, its silhouette sharp and predatory against the dim light of the junction. It was moving slowly, methodically, its sonar-logic nets pulsing through the water. Elias could feel the pulses, a faint, rhythmic pressure against his mind.
— Kill the drive, — Lena ordered, her voice a low hiss.
The hum of the mag-skiff died. They drifted in the current, a dead thing in the water. The Warden skiff continued its slow approach.
— They’re on a direct course, — the pilot said, his eyes glued to his small screen. — Their sweep will pass right over us in 90 seconds.
— We can’t outrun them, and we can’t hide, — another hunter murmured, his hand tightening on the grip of his stun baton.
— We go dark, — Lena said. She looked at her team. — Prepare for contact. On my mark, we hit them hard and fast. Disable their drive, kill their comms. No witnesses.
— No, — Elias said. The word was quiet, but it stopped them all.
Lena turned to him, her face a mask of disbelief. — They will find us, Elias. This isn’t a debate. It’s geometry.
— We will not engage, — Elias stated, his voice gaining strength. He was the commander of this mission. He had to be. This was his choice, his price to pay. He looked at the approaching light. The sonar pulses were stronger now, a persistent, questioning knock against his thoughts. — You trust your weapons. I will trust mine.
He closed his eyes. He reached out not to his own mind, but to the four minds with him in the boat. He didn’t force a connection. He offered one. He felt their fear, their anger, their readiness. It was a storm of chaotic energy. He didn’t try to calm it. He gathered it.
He remembered the lesson from the grief storms. Chaos is camouflage. But a storm was too loud, too noticeable. He needed a whisper. He took their coiled tension and wove it into something else. Not a spear. Not a shield. He wove it into a thread of pure, focused confusion. A psychic dead spot. A question with no answer.
He projected it forward, a hundred meters ahead of them, directly in the path of the Warden skiff. He didn’t blanket the area. He laid a single, invisible line in the water. A flaw in the weave of the world.
The Warden skiff glided forward. Its searchlight swept over their position, the beam passing through them as if they were ghosts. The sonar pulses continued, then faltered as they hit the line of confusion he had laid.
On the bridge of the Warden skiff, a technician would be seeing a sensor ghost. A flicker of impossible data. A reading that contradicted itself. He would run a diagnostic. It would come back clean. He would blame the old wiring in the canals, the signal reflection, the sheer filth of the water. He would make a note in his log and move on.
The searchlight swung away. The thrum of the Warden skiff’s engines grew louder, then passed them, continuing down the main channel. In a minute, it was gone.
Elias opened his eyes. A sharp pain lanced behind his temples. The focus required had been immense. Lena was staring at him, her mouth slightly open. The hard certainty in her eyes was gone, replaced by something he couldn’t read. It might have been respect.
— Engage the drive, — he said to the pilot, his voice strained. — Get us out of here.
The hum of the skiff returned, and they slid forward into the darkness, leaving the ghost of a question hanging in the water behind them.
They docked in a disused maintenance conduit, the transition jarring. One moment they were in the dark, wet guts of the city, the next they were climbing a rusted ladder into a world of white ceramic and sterile, silent air. The smells of rust and decay were replaced by the clean, antiseptic scent of recycled oxygen. They had surfaced.
The Hab-Block was a monument to automated efficiency. Long, white corridors stretched into infinity under flat, shadowless light panels. There were no people. There was no sound. Just the faint hum of the building’s life support. They moved in silence, their dark clothing a stark violation of the pristine environment. The numbers on the doors counted up. 7-G-42. 7-G-43.
Elias felt the cold first. A pocket of unnatural chill in the perfectly climate-controlled hallway. It grew more intense as they approached the end of the corridor. Cell-Gamma-7. The door was marked 7-G-71.
It was ajar.
A thin sliver of darkness in the seamless white wall. The cold poured from it, a tangible presence. It was the cold of a deep cellar, of a forgotten place. It was the cold of a room where something had died.
Lena’s team fanned out, weapons ready. She looked at Elias, a question in her eyes. He shook his head, holding up a hand. This was his to face first. He was the one who had sent them here. He was the one who had taught them to dream in this cold, sterile world.
He walked to the door, the cold washing over him. He put his hand on the cool metal. The silence from within was absolute.
He pushed the door and stepped into the cold.
